


Both Sides Now

by valenstyne



Category: Death Note
Genre: Angst, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hal is my favorite, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-10
Updated: 2013-05-10
Packaged: 2017-12-11 11:21:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/798146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valenstyne/pseuds/valenstyne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hal, after the end of everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Both Sides Now

Hal holds herself together through the last days in Japan, wears her professional facade even when she’s alone. She drinks a lot of coffee and does whatever work she can get her hands on late into the night, staying up as long as she physically can so she won’t have to lie in bed and think. Twice she wakes up to find herself still seated at the small table in her hotel room. 

Gevanni and Lester are polite as ever but keep their distance; Near is exactly the same as he always is, but Hal suspects things have changed under the surface. It occurs to her that he might feel some of the same things she does, in his own strange way. Finally Near announces one morning that the SPK members are free to leave Japan at their own discretion. Hal wastes no time booking the earliest flight possible back to New York the next day; she needs to be back among people she knows, out of the bubble that is the SPK and the Kira case.

She spends the night packing, takes a taxi to the airport at 6:30 a.m. and arrives at her gate with an hour to spare. She’s wearing her suit jacket from yesterday still, and as she sits down she feels an unfamiliar bump in her pocket. Hal pulls out the object and discovers it’s the finger puppet of herself that Near made. He must have slipped it into her jacket when she took it off at the SPK’s temporary headquarters yesterday. She stares at it for a long moment, searching its painted eyes and finding nothing, then drops it into her carryon. 

As the plane takes off, Hal looks out the window at the country dropping away beneath her, catching one last glimpse of the Japanese landscape. It’s beautiful, but she’d be happy never seeing it again. She shuts her eyes, glad she has the row all to herself; she couldn’t handle making small talk with a stranger right now. Unfortunately there is nothing to distract her, and memories flicker across her eyelids—Mello, Matt, guns and fire. 

Hal’s eyes fly open, and she stares at the whiteness outside her window as the plane passes through a cloud. She tries to think about something, anything, else, tries one last time to pull everything inside and pretend there’s nothing wrong, but she’s been doing that for too long already.

As the plane breaks through the clouds and soars into the endless blue, Hal finally lets herself cry.


End file.
